Hudson Guild
Partnership
The Hudson Guild is a recreational center providing extracurricular programs for underserved youth and seniors in the Chelsea area. We work with them to build custom self-watering gardening planters for the Chelsea-Elliot senior center and donate Baby Sprout EDU kits for their afterschool childrens programs.
Description
Starting in 2021, we began developing a self-watering gardening system that could sit inside the Hudson Guild Fulton Senior Center and supply its members with fresh fruits and vegetables. After over a year of development, including brainstorming and prototyping design concepts with residents of the center and program directors, we delivered our first planter in early June of 2023. Currently, this planter is growing radishes and being maintained by residents of the Center. We've received overwhelming positive feedback from both the residents and Hudson Guild directors regarding the mental health benefits of attending to the garden and having access to fresh, home-grown produce due to our planter. In fact, we've gotten several individual requests to build custom self-watering planters for the residents. Ultimately, we are super excited by the early success of this program and cannot wait to design more planters for the Senior Center and continue working with the Hudson Guild!
Impact by the numbers
Impact
1 custom planter
Recognition
Avenues Seedbank Grant, Lawrenceville Welles Award, Avenues Mastery Learning System
Recent progress
June 2023
Delivering and setting up the first planter
We delivered and set up our first automated watering planter at the Hudson Guild Fulton Senior Center. The gardening planter is growing red bell peppers and is one of many similar systems we plan on making for local community centers in the following weeks.
July 2023
Checking-in on the planter and meeting with seniors
We met with the members and residents of the Hudson Guild Fulton Senior Center to explain how our self-watering planter works! Earlier we replanted radish seeds because the red bell pepper plants weren't doing well, so we also got to check up on them which have already started to sprout!